Biography

Shirah Apple creates visual midrash—commentary—and opportunities for interaction that reflect the American Jewish experience.  She transforms materials with a sensibility of the work of the hand into beautiful, intimate, and interactive objects which celebrate rites of passage and the gift of living every day.

Ms. Apple received an MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006.  She is a graduate of MICA’s Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program and of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a B.S. in Business Administration. 

An artist with a strong community focus, Ms. Apple has been the Teen Programs Coordinator at the Milwaukee Art Museum and has conducted  more than 30 creative collaborations at the Franciscan Youth Center in Baltimore, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and community institutions in Milwaukee and Baltimore.  She also worked with Jewish and Arab children at a summer camp in Israel and with the Camp Swig Institute for Living Judaism in California.   Her community-building approach has been strongly influenced by workshops with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and New York’s Theater of the Oppressed.  She also worked with the 2007 Conney Conference on Jewish Arts, “Practicing Jews:  Art, Identity, and Culture” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Shirah recently exhibited at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Women of the Book exhibition with Argentinian printmaker Mirta Kupferminc.  She has had solo exhibitions in Washington, DC; Jerusalem, Israel; and Richmond, Virginia.  She has also shown at the official exhibition of the National Women’s Studies Association conference, the Milwaukee Art Museum., Woman Made Gallery in Chicage, Makor Gallery in New York City, Baltimore’s Artscape festival, the DC Arts Center in Washington, DC, the Rockville Civic Center in Rockville, Maryland, and other venues.  Her work is in the collection of the Embassy of Israel and in private collections in the U.S., Israel, and South Africa.   An accomplished public speaker, she has addressed many audiences on her work and on that of other contemporary Jewish artists.

She has participated in artist residencies at the Center for Arts and Religion at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and at the Arad Arts Project in Arad, Israel.  During her stay in Israel, she also studied Jewish texts in a yeshiva setting and learned the art of writing the ktav assurit (letters for writing the Torah) from a scribe.

Shirah Rachel Apple was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and has lived in nine states as well as Japan, England, and Israel.  She currently resides in Milwaukee.